SEO 101: The Fundamentals of Website Optimization

Simple tools and tricks to boost your website's Google profile

Search engine optimization has grown up quite a bit since its start in the mid-1990s.

At its inception, search engine optimization (SEO) was fairly basic; marketers and website creators would submit their website URLs to the various search engines, like Google and Bing, who would then send a “spider” to “crawl” the page, looking for links, words or other content that it could reference in a search. These spiders would rely heavily on Keyword Density when creating result ranks, which posed one serious problem; all a webmaster or website owner needed to do in order to achieve priority in a search was grossly misuse the tagging function by including any number of keyword tags as he/she liked—whether relevant to the website or not. It was a manipulation of content, and most often remembered for the abundance of links included on a website in the hopes that it would rank higher in search results.

Since then, most search engines have upgraded and refined their ranking processes. Now, a copious number of links will actually downgrade a website’s ranking, and Google recommends doing keyword research before creating content. To quote its SEO guide: “Your SEO keywords need to appear in your content – just don’t overdo it or your content will look spammy.” (For a full list of tips, visit wordstream.com/google-seo-guide to see Google’s resource on SEO.)

In this new era of search engine optimization, it pays to be smart about it: do your research, develop a strategy and spend some time thoughtfully crafting your website to match. There’s nothing worse than searching for your winery and having it show up dead last on Google’s results. A beautiful website means nothing if it doesn’t appear “above the fold” on a Google Search.

That’s not to say you need to spend thousands of dollars on an SEO plan—in fact, Taylor Eason of Cork and Fork Digital Media and Martial Chaput of Newtimer Marketing were quick to point out that there are a number of free and easy tools anyone can use to make winery websites search engine and user-friendly. At the Direct to Consumer Wine Symposium in January, the two experts explained that keywords, re-targeted ads and an integrated web strategy are vital to an effective online DTC strategy. Understand your customer, understand how they search for new wines, understand your winery’s top goal for its website and build the site around those three factors.

Step One:

Do Your Research

An audit is more than a hassle around tax time: It’s an essential first step in creating an SEO strategy.

Do an audit of your website. What would someone viewing your site for the first time see? Where are their eyes led? Do your social media profiles—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.—tell the same brand story, and in the same style, as your website? Are you appearing at the top of Google search results? What photos do search engines associate with your website?

Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools or any other website analysis tool can help in this research. Look at the average time a user spends on your site, how they arrived at the page, and which pages they spend the most time on.

Eason recommended a number of tools within Google Analytics. The “sessions” function reports session duration, as well as how a visitor moves through the website, giving you an inside look at what interests them and if there are any barriers to purchase. The “interests” function provides some psychographic data on a user, such as location and type of device used to view the site. “Acquisition and channels” is one of Eason’s favorites because it lets you know how a visitor arrived at the site. About 50 percent of the time, it’s from Google, she said, but it’s still valuable to know the various ways in which a site is entered.

She also pointed out that you can hook up Google Analytics to your sales/shopping cart for an additional look at time before cart abandonment, who’s looking to buy and more.

From there, take a look at your content. Are you using text, photos and navigation in a way that accurately and enticingly explains your brand story? Do you have too much content or too little? Is it compelling? Does it match across your entire web presence?

Understanding the current state of your website is crucial—you need to know how, and what kind of, traffic is moving through your site. Once you’ve found these answers, it’s time to think about improvements.

Step Two:

Develop a Strategy

Before creating steps to optimize your website, you need to determine its goal. What exactly do you want the site to accomplish? Chaput and Eason agreed that there can only be one goal for a website, not two, and each winery needs to determine what its specific goal is.

Often the main objective of a winery website is to sell wine, but the reality is most pages aren’t set up to do that. There are too many competing interests. If the main goal of the website is to sell wine, why isn’t that front and center when visitors land on your homepage? If the main goal is to sell wine, why don’t the “Purchase” or “Shop” pages appear on Google’s search results?

Obviously, each site’s mission will be different: some will want to drive visitors to the tasting room, so a winery’s address and phone number will appear; maybe they’ve just launched a new tasting experience, so the description and reservation information is most important. Whatever the stated goal, it should be the first thing a visitor sees and appear on the top of Google’s results.

What photos can you include to promote your new tasting experience? Would a landing page with a clear “Shop Our Wines” button make sense? How do you adjust page navigation to clearly lead a visitor through your brand story? Eason and Chaput encouraged attendees to think about how they make purchases or interact with other brands online, using the best practices for their own sites and removing barriers or negative experiences, then create a plan to build or adjust a website to match.

Chaput and Eason also recommended trying a landing page free of clutter, with a clear directive. Though both said that every page of a website must serve a purpose, the landing page needs to be simple; include a striking visual, clear message and call to purpose, with an easy and straightforward navigation bar. Nuclear Wine Co. (www.nuclearwines.com) was shown as a perfect example.

Keep in mind that in order to implement the new strategy, your content management system (CMS) needs to be able to easily accommodate new SEO strategies and sales tweaks. If it’s a hassle to make changes, or you need to rely on a third-party to update or adjust website content, it might be time to change your website host or CMS. Eason said that spending a ton of money for a new website/CMS isn’t necessary. Using Squarespace or Weebly as your website host can be just as effective and visually striking as spending thousands of dollars for a custom-designed site. Either way, the work to build it, is worth it, she said. A new, optimized site can increase sales by up to 25 percent in her experience.

Step Three:

Understand What Search Engines Want

In addition to knowing how your visitors move through a site, it is also necessary to know what search engines are looking for and incorporate those needs into a strategy. While this list is not comprehensive, Eason said these are some of the more fundamental factors that go into creating organic search results: high-quality original content (text, photos and links to brand-owned social media), keywording in content and images (more on this later), using an SEO-friendly web host, fast loading speeds, mobile responsiveness and a safe URL. Chaput cited LUMEN Wines’ website (www.lumenwines.com) as a great example of this.

Also important to note is that your site is dinged on Google’s results if your website is not mobile-friendly, and that should not come as much of a surprise. The rise of the mobile browser has been widely reported across all forms of news outlets and in research, even in the page of Wine Business Monthly.

Build two pages on your site: one that lists all wines produced (“Wines”) and one that has only those available for sale (“Shop” or “Purchase”). Though it might sound counterintuitive to have two pages dedicated to the wines your facility produces, Google likes it. Because it is usually static, including all wines a winery produces even if unavailable for purchase, the “Wines” page is helpful to Google in that it’s unchanging—Google always has a site to reference to. The “Shop” or “Purchase” tab/page however, is more fluid, moving product in or out based on availability. Search engines are not quick to update their cache of websites and content, and the constant changing of keywords and images lags; so having a dedicated, infrequently changed page can be beneficial, Eason said.

Step Four:

Optimize Your Site

Now that you have a plan in mind, the time has come to optimize the site. The first, and one of the more important tasks, is to keyword, i.e., the words entered into search engines to find your site. A well-optimized site will know which terms and words customers and potential visitors will use and include them as image tags, navigation bar tabs, page names, and even in original content such as blogs or taglines. Using the right keywords is essential to driving as much traffic to your site as possible and making the right connections.

According to Google, the three main keywording mistakes people make are:

• Only doing SEO keyword research once,

• Not bothering to update and expand their SEO keyword list, or

• Targeting keywords that are too popular, meaning they’re way too competitive.

There are two types of keywords: head/singular and long-tail. Head keywords are more broad and vague. Examples in this industry could include “wine” or “vineyard.” While they could be tempting to use because they would appear to have a high search volume, there’s a good chance that these will provide too many, and possibly irrelevant, search results. Was the searcher really looking for wine shops instead of wineries nearby? Or were they looking for how wine is made? Did the vineyard searcher have photos of vines in mind, or did they want to read more about the latest vineyard transaction?

Long-tailed keywords, however, are a bit more specific and show more of the searcher’s intent. Examples could be “purchase Sonoma County Viognier” or “best wine pairing for a steak dinner.” Searches like these bring up typically fewer results, and those websites that tag this way are more likely to make a mark on the top of Google’s fold. A smart SEO strategy will include both types of keywords.

Pick your best keywords and tag images and content with them. The results will not be instant. Eason points out she usually signs 12-month contracts with her clients—six months spent optimizing and six months to track the results.

Step Five:

Track, Track, Track

Using an analytic service, set up goals for your ad campaigns and website. If the keywords and measures you’ve put into place are not delivering the expected results, try something new; just remember that it might take some time for the SEO measures to follow through.

No effort is worth the hassle if you can’t measure whether it’s worked or not. Chaput outlined some of the goals and key performance indicators you should measure, specifically mentioning conversion rate optimization (the process by which a website’s conversion rate is improved using both visual and organizational best practices) as an important gauge. Following your SEO adjustments, are you seeing more wine club requests? Did sales, by dollar or volume, increase? Did customers stay on your site and engaged for a longer period of time? These are all fundamental and valuable improvements to site experience and brand enhancement.

The Long and Short of It

Making adjustments to your website’s SEO strategy (or even creating a plan in the first place) can make quite a difference in your sales, according to Chaput and Eason. Using free tools like Google Webmaster, Google Analytics, or Lucky Orange to track website visitation and engagement can allow you to better understand and manipulate a very vital direct-to-consumer sales channel: your online presence. Spending an hour or two each week working on SEO is well worth the time, they said.

This article originally appeared in the March 2018 issue of Wine Business Monthly.